George Will describes it as "presentism" whereby modern views on morality are imposed on past actions. Will’s crucial point is that if we continue down this path of judging the past through a present-tense lens, eventually those judging and canceling will find themselves being judged and canceled.
It’s just a comment that whatever the underlying truth about economist Lawrence Summers’s present-day expressions of “shame” about the past, the fact that his past actions elicited no outrage from left, right or in between calls into question his present-day cancelation. Isn’t the societal point to constantly learn from the past, and improve on it?
What’s arguably more notable about Summers given their more globalized impact are his views on the economy. We find in his cancelation that the allegedly brilliant Summers was very much in demand on the speaking circuit, by elected officials, hedge funds mining his supposedly deep insights into economic matters, not to mention his newspaper columns in influential newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Unknown is why.
Consider Summers’s so-called Joe Biden-era apostasy. He pushed back against the government spending that Biden signed into law not because the central planning of precious resources extracted from the private sector always and everywhere saps freedom and economic growth, but because in the eyes of the alleged seer in Summers, the spending would cause an excess of economic growth. Please stop and think about this.
According to Summers, the substitution of the information-pregnant market’s allocation of resources by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Biden would cause the U.S. economy to soar. Really? How? And if so, why didn’t Pelosi, Schumer and Biden double or triple outlays?
The answer to the above question further underscores the impressive absurdity of Summers’s economic views. You see, Summers was against spending he laughably felt would grow the economy given his belief that economic growth causes inflation. Forget that growth is but another word for productivity such that much more is produced for much less, and just remember that Summers, like most economists, worships at the altar of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations that increase the more that governments spend. To say that GDP is a monument to double counting insults understatement.
Which means Summers’s neo-inflation argument was similarly a monument to double counting given the more obvious truth that governments lacking resources can’t increase demand as much they can shift it from one set of hands to another. Absent what they take from us, governments have no demand contra Summers, Jason Furman, and a host of conservatives who discovered their inner Keynesian in overnight fashion back when Biden resided in the White House.
As the mildly sentient reading this opinion piece can doubtless imagine, Summers’s confusion about government spending, economic growth and inflation during the Biden years was hardly the first time he paired a high IQ with a remarkable lack of common sense. Please Google “secular stagnation” and “Summers” for more evidence supporting this claim, and realistically all his opinion pieces going back decades. Despite this, we learn now that Summers was long paid substantial sums for expressing insights belied by simple logic.
It recalls a story told by Warren Brookes (1929-1991), a non-PhD bursting with common sense, about an economist stopped by a Passport Control officer at JFK in the late 1970s. The officer questioned re-admitting the economist considering the immense, global damage foisted on the world by his profession. Will presentism ever ensnare PhDs in addition to the frisky?
